tw // Bill Hader

In this thread I will talk about the accusations that BH is a racist because he did blackface on SNL. I won’t downplay the fact that people can still feel offended by it. I want to talk about the racism part, so we can stop having these arguments.

Let’s start by watching the Video, shall we? Because it’s easy to just take a screenshot and send it to everyone on the internet without watching the sketch.
As you can see the tenor of this sketch was that “Al Pacino” plays all kinds of accused murderers.

Now comes the part where the screenshot is taken from. Bill as Al Pacino playing the accused murderer of Michael Jackson. The sketch is clearly making fun of „Al Pacino doing blackface“. This also gets extra attention by the pause, where „Al Pacino“ is suddenly out of character.

The question remains, is it blackface? Yes, since they let a white man portrait a black man, nonetheless. “Blacking up” can never be positive. Though, it’s not always a racist intention behind it. Though, black people can still feel offended by this.

On the other hand though, it doesn’t justify calling those actors racist. Especially when the intention was to criticize blackface. As an example, Robert Downey Jr. and Ben Stiller tried the same thing in Trpical Thunder. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/01/22/downey-blackface-tropic-thunder/

Again, “blacking up” can never be positive and that’s the main issue in modern days. Try to spread this message instead of calling everyone who has good intentions with bad executions a racist. Just like Bill Hader is far from being racist. This should be obvious but here we go:

Bill Hader reflects that playing different ethnicities at SNL was wrong, even if they were oblivious to this fact back in the day. He’s also pointing out that Donals Trump is a racist misogynist.
(Source: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a28989903/bill-hader-barry-hbo-donald-trump-comedy-interview-2019/)

He’s also said in multiple interviews that the intention was never to hurt someone by playing different characters or saying words which aren’t pc - and that it was ignorant for not knowing better.

So, you can hate Bill Hader for whatever reason suits you but just commenting every tweet about him with “he did blackface” doesn’t do anything. Keep the energy to fight racism, misogyny and homophobia where it’s really needed - for example start with your fucking president.